Jazz and 'The Mountaintop': Rep unveils lineup

Downtown theater to revisit 'Hammer,' stage new works

Playwright Katori Hall wrote the award-winning work "The Mountaintop," an imaginative meditation on the last night of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. San Diego Repertory Theatre will stage the play's West Coast premiere next March as part of the theater's 2012-13 season.
— AP

Playwright Katori Hall wrote the award-winning work "The Mountaintop," an imaginative meditation on the last night of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. San Diego Repertory Theatre will stage the play's West Coast premiere next March as part of the theater's 2012-13 season.
/ AP

San Diego Repertory Theatre gave a peek at its 2012-13 dance card a couple of weeks ago with the announcement it would stage a revival of Luis Valdez's landmark, music-infused play "Zoot Suit," last done at the downtown theater in 1997.

Now the Rep has announced the full season slate, and it includes a healthy dose of music, as well as new plays that line up with the company's longtime reputation for diversity.

"Zoot Suit" arrives first, in a production directed by onetime Sledgehammer Theatre artistic chief Kirsten Brandt and choreographed by San Diego stalwart Javier Velasco. The show once again teams the Rep with young artists from the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. "Zoot Suit" runs July 14 to Aug. 12 (officially opening July 20) on the main Lyceum Stage.

Here's what comes next:

• “A Hammer, A Bell, and A Song to Sing,” November/December 2012, Lyceum Stage: What started a year or so ago as a musical tribute to the folk-music icon Pete Seeger became a broader ode to change in America as expressed in song (after Seeger expressed his own eventual discomfort at seeing his life portrayed onstage).

The Rep staged a workshop version of associate artistic director Todd Salovey's of "A Hammer, A Bell" last fall; now the well-received piece returns as a full, world-premiere production. Salovey again directs the actor-musician trio of Vaughn Armstrong, Dave Crossland and Jim Mooney, with musical direction and arrangements by Bruno Louchouarn.

• Reduced Shakespeare Company in “The Ultimate Christmas Show (abridged)," December 2012, Lyceum Stage: The original mad minimizers return to the Rep with this condensation of Christmas classics - the first official holiday production the Rep has done in seven years. The Reduced braintrust of Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor created and will direct the piece, brought to you courtesy of the St. Everybody's Non-Denominational Universalist Church.

• “Clybourne Park," January/February 2013, Lyceum Stage: Bruce Norris' play, the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was conceived as a sequel to Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking 1959 work "A Raisin in the Sun." Rep co-founder and artistic chief Sam Woodhouse directs the local premiere of the piece, which chronicles the lingering, sometimes surprising legacies of racial and class conflict in a supposedly transformed America.

• “The Mountaintop,” March 2013, Lyceum Space: Katori Hall is one of the most talked-about young playwrights in America, and the Rep's production - a West Coast premiere - is something of a coup for the company. After premiering in London in 2009, "The Mountaintop" ran on Broadway (closing this past January) with a cast that included Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett.

Hall's play is an imaginative interpretation of the final night of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, just before he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. No director has yet been announced for the Rep production.

• “Federal Jazz Project," April/May 2013: This world-premiere work offers an intriguing and promising pairing: Playwright and Culture Clash co-founder Richard Montoya, who conceived and wrote the piece, and San Diego jazz institution and trumpet ace Gilbert Castellanos, who is composing and curating its music.